


If You Need Shelter

by AfraidOfBananas



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Adoptive parent betsy, Gen, They’re both teenagers in this, but it’s implied that it could happen later, mentions of Lola and Romero, mild depiction of injuries, slight angst? maybe???, they aren’t really together in this so I feel weird tagging andreil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:55:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29406567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AfraidOfBananas/pseuds/AfraidOfBananas
Summary: “The boy is staring at Neil with a startled expression like he’s just seen a ghost. Well, maybe he has. Neil hasn’t felt alive for a very long time.”Or.....Neil meets Andrew while he’s on the run
Comments: 5
Kudos: 73





	If You Need Shelter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [doubledoubleu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doubledoubleu/gifts).



> This is for Nick!!! They requested “Andrew and Neil meet in high school/when they’re on the run” so I tried my best. It feels very incomplete because it’s so short, but I hope it satisfies the prompt well enough :)

His body hurts _so bad._

It’s not just his bloody feet, bare and scraping across the asphalt whenever he trips a little. It’s not just his sore legs, weary and unsteady from disuse for so long. It’s not just his pounding head, throbbing in rhythm with the long strides he takes.

No what really hurts the most is Neil’s chest. His lungs scream at him to stop, and his throat burns from gulping in lungful after lungful of air as he tries not to collapse. Although at this rate, it’s more likely he’ll hyperventilate before that happens.

He feels like fucking Orpheus right now; He wants to look back, just for a second, just to see if they’re still chasing him, but he can’t. If Neil looks back he’ll surely trip, or at the very least lose some of his momentum. He hasn’t heard Romero’s heavy footsteps behind him for a while now, but Lola has always been much quieter, and Neil is fast, but he’s also injured so there’s no telling how much distance he’s put between them by now. Besides, he probably wouldn’t be able to hear any footsteps over the sound of his own labored breathing.

Perhaps this is why he doesn’t hear the rustle of the bags. The darkness of the night obscures Neil’s gaze like a thick blindfold as he blinks rapidly to fight back the tears threatening to leak out every time he steps on a rock. It’s hard to tell how far he’s gone or how long he’s been running; Either it’s only been a few minutes, or this neighborhood just never ends. Neil passes house after house, trying in vain to speed past the ones with their porch lights on. The street doesn’t offer much protection, but ducking into someone’s yard or climbing a fence would force him to slow down, and getting to a main road could risk him getting picked up by a good samaritan and being dropped off at a hospital. Both options are out out of the question. So he keeps running.

He doesn’t hear the rustling.

He doesn’t notice the dark shape moving down a driveway up ahead.

Moving toward the street.

Toward him.

No, Neil can only focus on what’s behind him and how far away he needs to be from it. So when Neil runs past the next house’s driveway, and a boy steps up to the curb of the street, they inevitably collide.

Neil crashes into someone with the full force of his momentum, sending them both tumbling onto the hard ground. He lands heavily on his left knee and feels his bare elbow and forearm scrape against the pavement, making him let out a sharp cry before biting his lip to stifle the sound. He bites down until the metallic taste of blood is enough to focus his mind on something other than the pain searing through his leg.

When he opens his eyes, Neil sees a person sitting on their ass a foot away from him. He looks to be a boy about Neil’s age, and he’s wearing black sweatpants and an oversized black sweater. No wonder Neil didn’t see him in the dark.

The boy is staring at Neil with a startled expression like he’s just seen a ghost. Well, maybe he has. Neil hasn’t felt alive for a very long time.

But he has to keep going. He’s wasting valuable seconds laying here on his side, seconds where Lola is surely catching up to him. Neil pushes himself into a sitting position with his good arm, but he nearly passes out when he tries to stand. His knee feels molten as it flares up in burning pain. He can’t put any weight on it, that’s for sure. He can’t run.

He can’t run.

_He can’t run._

_**He can’t run.** _

“Who are you?”

The question snaps Neil out of his mental spiral, and he flicks his eyes over to the boy. Then he feels his shoulders loosen a little when he observes the street in the direction he was coming from.

It’s empty. Thank the _fucking_ lord.

But that doesn’t mean he’s safe. Maybe Lola saw the boy and decided to hide in the bushes of that house over there. Or maybe she’s watching him from the other side of the street. Or maybe—

“Hey.”

Neil looks back to the boy, trying to focus on him again. His hair might be blonde or just a really light shade of brown. It’s hard to tell when the yard is completely dark, but his skin is definitely pale and starkly contrasting the all-black ensemble.

“Who are you?” The boy asks again. His face looks startled, but his eyes are calculating, sizing Neil up and probably determining how crazy he is.

But Neil has to keep going, has to get somewhere safer than here, has to find one of his mother’s contacts and beg for their help.

“Stop moving,” the boy scolds when Neil makes a pained noise after attempting to stand again. “You’re hurt. I’ll go get help.”

Neil shoots his arm out before he can think twice about it and grasps the boy’s leg before he can fully get to his feet. It’s his left arm, the one that’s stinging acutely from scraping it against the concrete, and Neil hisses through his teeth at the sensation. “No!” He shouts in a whisper. “I can’t—I—I can’t go to a hospital.”

“You need medical attention.”

“Nooooo…” The word comes out more of whine this time as Neil relinquishes his hold to retract his arm and cradle it to his chest.

The boy is starting to sound exasperated now. “Let me help. You can’t even walk.”

“I can.”

“No you can’t. Your leg is hurt.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not.”

Neil wants to argue, but his knee feels worse the more he moves it. It doesn’t look obviously injured when he glances at it, but the pain is excruciating so something must be wrong with it. He’ll never make it anywhere by himself in this state, not to mention his scraped arm and bloodied feet. He really has no other choice.

“No hospitals,” Neil repeats.

“No hospitals,” the boy agrees.

Neil nods his head slowly and allows the boy to lean over and sling an arm around Neil’s waist, attempting to haul him up to his feet. Neil makes sure to shift all of his weight onto his right foot, but it still hurts enough to make him dizzy for a moment. The boy prompts Neil to drape an arm over his shoulders, which Neil does begrudgingly. He keeps his knee bent at the exact same angle, and the two of them hobble up the driveway like some ridiculous variation of a three-legged race.

The boy ushers Neil into the garage and encourages him to sit on a workbench for a minute to catch his breath. The boy runs back out to the curb, and only then does Neil notice the trash strewn across the driveway. It looks like it’s coming from one of two trash bags laying on their sides haphazardly. The boy must have been taking out the trash and then dropped it when Neil ran into him.

Watching the boy pick up the debris and stuff it back in the bags, Neil begins to feel guilty about the whole situation. He doesn’t want to be a burden, and he needs to keep moving before Lola and Romero figure out where he is. But before Neil has the chance to run—or fail spectacularly since his jaw clenches painfully every time he shifts his knee—out of the garage, the boy appears at his side again.

He scrutinizes Neil for a moment before asking, “What’s your name?”

Neil opens his mouth to answer but chokes on the words before they can escape. What should he say? He isn’t “Nathaniel” anymore. Hasn’t been for a while now. “Abram” feels the most familiar, but it’s too vulnerable. His mother was the only one to ever call him that, and hearing someone else use it not even a year after her death would just be too much, and Neil is already feeling fragile enough as it is. He could give one of his old names: Chris, Stefan, Alex, etc. But he’s been taught to never use the same name twice. He could make up a new name since he’ll have to in a few weeks anyway. But he’s never been good at coming up with names on the spot, and for the life of him he can’t think of any right now. Not a single damn name except his own.

But “Neil” could be different. He picked it out after his mother died, and he’s never actually written it down before. He told some girl at the gas station and a waiter in a diner off the highway, plus maybe one or two drivers he met while hitchhiking. But thinking back on it, he’s barely used this name at all. Barely told it to anyone who matters. And the name has almost carved itself a place inside of Neil. It’s the first name he’s ever had that he doesn’t associate with his past, and he kind of wants to hold onto that feeling for a bit longer.

“Neil.”

The boy drapes Neil’s arms around his shoulders again and says, “I’m Andrew.” Then the two of them hobble into the house together.

The door from the garage opens into a mudroom, and Neil is instantly struck by how nice this house must be. There’s no way it’s anywhere near as fancy as his childhood house in Baltimore, but between renting cheap motel rooms and squatting in abandoned buildings, Neil hasn’t been in a house with post-2000 furnishings for years.

Andrew leads them down a hallway into the kitchen and helps Neil situate himself in a chair at the dining table. The pain is excruciating, and Neil finds that he’s actually panting from just the short walk from one room to another. There’s no way he’ll be able to leave in this state.

“Wait here, I’m getting my mom,” Andrew says before ducking around the corner. His heavy footsteps on a distant set of stairs echoes through the house, setting Neil even more on edge. What is he even doing here? He can’t trust these people not to ruin things for him, especially if Andrew is getting an adult involved.

When Andrew comes back downstairs and into the kitchen, he’s trailed by a woman. Narrow-framed glasses are perched upon her nose, but her messy brown hair and blue pajama set suggests that she actually just woke up. Again Neil feels that spike of guilt somewhere in his gut, but the sensation is instantly overpowered by the feeling of vigilance that comes with being incapacitated in an unfamiliar place with an complete stranger. Neil isn’t sure why, but Andrew hadn’t feel like a threat. Maybe it was his age, or it could have been his calm demeanor. Whatever the reason, Neil had instantly—albeit unfathomably—trusted Andrew immediately. But this woman is an unknown variable. Her eyes are sharp as she stalks up to Neil and slides into the chair beside him.

“Hello,” she says. “I’m Betsy. I’ve heard that your name is Neil?”

Neil nods reluctantly. He’ll have to change his name even sooner if he keeps giving it out to people carelessly.

“Andrew also tells me that you won’t go to a hospital?”

Neil nods again, much more hurriedly this time.

“Alright Neil,” she says, sighing through the words. “You’re clearly hurt, and I need to check you over to see how bad the damage is. I promise I won’t take you to the hospital, but you have to tell me what happened when I’m done, okay?”

Neil doesn’t think he should be making this deal. Betsy talks slowly with a patient tone and an even cadence, like she’s trying to reason with a wild animal. Maybe she can sense how skittish Neil feels in this moment, already clocking the exits and memorizing the layout of the house that he’s seen so far. She’s clearly perceptive, and Neil can’t trust people like that.

They notice too much.

But Neil has no other choice, so he lets Betsy inspecting his injuries while he tries to come up with a believable lie to tell her. He can’t say that he just escaped from a car he was being transported in after getting tortured by his father’s favorite lackeys. But it’s hard to imagine any situation that could earn him such strategically placed bruises and scars. 

Meanwhile, Andrew sits in the chair opposite from Neil’s and watches him, chin propped up by his hands, elbows on the dark wooden table. Neil gets distracted watching him right back. Until Betsy touches his knee, and Neil startles so hard that his other leg jolts up and bangs against the underside of the table.

Great. Now he’ll have a bruise on both legs like a pair of splotchy purple knee pads.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,” Betsy apologizes. “I think there’s something wrong with your kneecap. It might be dislocated.”

Dread pools in his stomach at her words. “How long will it take to heal?”

Betsy looks at him with kind eyes, but Neil doesn’t trust them for a second. “It’s hard to say, but probably longer than you seem to be hoping for. You need medical attention.”

“No,” Neil instantly says, voice strong despite the helpless feeling clawing its way through his chest.

Betsy raises her hands in a placating gesture. “I won’t take you to the hospital,” she promises. “But you __do_ need to see a doctor. I have a friend that can help. She’s a nurse, and she won’t ask any questions if you don’t want her too.”_

_Neil opens his mouth to reject the offer, but Andrew beats him to it and says, “Sounds like a plan.”_

_Neil whips his head around to glare at Andrew incredulously, but Andrew just meets him with an even stare of his own, daring Neil to argue._

_It’s sounds enough like complicity to Betsy, who rises from the table and tells them, “I’ll call Abby tomorrow morning. Neil, you can sleep in Andrew’s room tonight.” Then she sags her shoulders and walks out of the kitchen._

_The two of them sit in silence at the table for a few minutes—Neil assessing the situation and Andrew assessing him. Neil doesn’t know what to do. He’s barely stopped moving since his mother died, and the thought of sleeping in someone’s house for more an entire night is daunting for reasons he can’t pinpoint. He must have started shaking at some point because suddenly Andrew is standing next to him and grabbing his hands, holding them still._

_“You’re going to be okay,” he tells Neil. “We’ll figure everything out in the morning.”_

_Neil nods numbly, but he feels hollow and empty as Andrew half drags him up the stairs to what must be his bedroom. They don’t change clothes or brush their teeth or do anything really. Andrew pushes Neil onto the bed before grabbing a blanket and making himself a cozy spot on the floor below. Neil wants to object to taking Andrew’s bed, but his eyes are already closing before he can say anything._

_Maybe he’ll tell them the truth in the morning, or maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll sneak out before anyone wakes up, or maybe his knee will still be too painful to stand on. Maybe Andrew is right. Maybe they’ll figure it out in the morning, and Neil will be on his way as soon as possible._

_Or maybe, this could be a sign that it’s time to try something new._

_He’ll think about it in the morning._

**Author's Note:**

> Aaron peacefully slept through all of this upstairs in his own room
> 
> Find me on Twitter! @afraidofbananas


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